Asus always has a wide variety of boards and the new X870 and X870E chipsets are no different with Asus launching initially with 9 different models. I’ve got a few different Asus X870 boards on hand to check out but I’m going to start with their only TUF Gaming model, the TUF Gaming X870-Plus Wifi. I was a big TUF fan when it first launched but this is the first TUF board I’ve had in the office for years now. I liked what I saw from the TUF lineup on the GPU side when I took a look at the ASUS TUF Gaming RTX 4070 Ti SUPER earlier this year. Let’s dive into the TUF Gaming X870-Plus Wifi and see if it continues that trend.

Product Name:    Asus TUF Gaming X870-Plus Wifi

Review Sample Provided by: Asus

Written by: Wes Compton

Amazon Affiliate Link: HERE

Packaging and Accessories

The box for the TUF Gaming X870-Plus Wifi has the TUF logo all across the background. They doubled and tripled up on the TUF branding with the full logo in the bottom right corner and then again above the motherboard name as well. The Asus logo is also there in the top left corner. Along the bottom edge they touch on PCIe 5.0 support and Wifi7 then in the bottom right corner you have the AMD required branding that shows that this is a Ryzen AM5 motherboard and the X870 chipset. Around on the back of the box, you get a top-down full picture of the TUF Gaming X870-Plus Wifi. Asus has a specification listing that fills up a majority of the rest of the back along with a line drawing that shows you what your rear I/O connections are. They do highlight a few features up at the top with icons as well. Overall though, you can see what you are getting when shopping in retail including a lot of the specifications that you don’t normally see on packaging so that is great to see.

When you open the box up, the TUF Gaming X870-Plus Wifi comes wrapped up in a static protective bag and is sitting in a white cardboard tray. They have a cardboard insert on top as well to keep it from bouncing around and inside of that they have the wireless antenna hidden away. For documentation, you get a quick start guide that is specific to the TUF Gaming X870-Plus Wifi and a paper on Asus WebStorage along with a foiled sticker sheet with a bunch of TUF Gaming logo stickers.

The TUF Gaming X870-Plus Wifi isn’t the cheapest X870 board from Asus but it is budget minded and you can see that difference in the amount of accessories that it comes with when you compare it to their higher-end boards (that I will also be checking out today in other reviews). You get a bag with two black SATA cables and three smaller baggies. Two of these have small rubber mounts in them and one has a small screw. All three of those are for M.2 drive installations. The only other accessory included is the wireless antenna and the TUF Gaming X870-Plus Wifi has the same antenna as you will see with most Asus motherboards. This antenna has two of the new snap on connections which will make plugging it in a lot easier than the old screw on antenna plugs. The antenna itself is black and flips up. It has a rubber base with magnets inside as well to let you stick it to your case if you have a steel case.

Board Layout and Pictures

I mentioned earlier that I haven’t had a TUF motherboard in the office for years. I double-checked and that goes all the way back to 2013 which is crazy. Back then, the first few generations of TUF boards had a unique styling that covered the top and often the bottom of the motherboard up completely to protect it. This did of course have downsides when it came to cooling, but it did create a cool on-brand look that I thought was cool. Later though the TUF brand changed up and adopted the yellow which you still see here on this board in a few spots. They still had TUF-specific board features, but as far as styling went they took a step back from the initial look to something simpler. This new generation though, I’m digging the look even if it doesn’t fit my styling as much. The chrome TUF logo on top of the rear I/O and the semi-enclosed floating logo design on the chipset cooler reminds me of big truck brands. The chrome TUF especially fits this, it's like the large RAM logo on the back of some of the Ram trucks or the F-150 logo on an F-150 and that is really on brand with the idea of this being TUF. With this not being at the top of their product stack it doesn’t have crazy heatsinks covering the entire board, but they aren’t too far off. I will still always miss the cool military-like covers of the old original TUF boards, but I think this look is on point.

The TUF Gaming X870-Plus Wifi has a 16+2+1 VRM configuration sitting to the top and left of the CPU socket. With that, they have heatsinks over both rows. The left side is the larger of the two and that heatsink extends up and over the rear I/O and has that large chrome TUF logo on it. The top one is smaller and is smaller and shorter. Both do have groves machined into the sides to add to the surface area but I was surprised to see that they didn’t tie the two together with a heatpipe at all. It will be interesting to see if one of the two gets warmer later when I check out the thermals. Also for heatsinks, the chipset has a small low profile heatsink over it but they have covered it with a clear cover to give it that floating TUF logo on top so I don’t think they are too concerned with that warming up too much. Then to the left of that, there is one large black heatsink that sits over top of two M.2 slots. The third M.2 is then above that with its own heatsink sitting over the PCIe slot. These are all around your video card but at least that top one isn’t going to be sitting up under the video card when it gets hot.

Starting up in the top left corner, a majority of this quarter of the TUF Gaming X870-Plus Wifi is filled with the VRMs, CPU socket, the rear I/O, and the heatsinks keeping things cool. Asus does have the two 8-pin CPU power plugs hiding up there sitting just above the VRM heatsink. These are interestingly the only power ports not in black on this board, I wonder if Asus did this to make them at least a little visible up here, either way, though there isn’t anything else going on in this section.

For the top right quadrant, the four DDR5 DIMMS are filling up a lot of the inner space. They have done every other DIMM in black and that same grey here and Asus did label them letting you know which you should use first which is always helpful. Above the RAM there are three 4-pin PWM headers, one is black and is for an all-in-one coolers pump and the other two are for the CPU fan with one main one and one optional. Those fan headers are farther over than I would have expected, normally for air cooling the headers would still be over close to the CPU socket. Right next to those in the corner, Asus has put in a few small LEDs that are labeled, these give you a boot status to help with diagnosing boot issues. Then below that you have a white addressable RGB header and then the 24-pin motherboard power. Below the motherboard power, the TUF Gaming X870-Plus Wifi has one front panel header for USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 speeds which supports 30-watt fast charging that they call PD 3.0, and one older USB 3.2 Gen 1 header. The TUF Gaming X870-Plus Wifi doesn’t miss anything you might need here, but it isn’t loaded up with extra features as well.

For the bottom right quadrant of the TUF Gaming X870-Plus Wifi, you start with a PCIe latch helper button and honestly, I almost missed this in my testing because it blends in. It is right below the USB 3 header. I’m happy to see that this feature was included, I’ve been spoiled with it on our test benches for a while now and it can prevent board damage when you are poking things down trying to press the latch when you have a large video card installed. Below that are two SATA ports which are right-angled and face out the side of the board. Then we skip down to the bottom right corner where they have the front panel connection. Next to that, the two-pin header is a chassis intrusion header and then you have another 4-pin PWM header, this one is also labeled for water pump use. The two-pin header next to that clears the CMOS then you have two more USB headers, this time USB 2.0. On down from there is one thermal sensor header and a debug communication header before you get two more addressable RGB headers totaling three but I should also note there aren’t any 4-pin standard RGB headers on the TUF Gaming X870-Plus Wifi.

The bottom left quadrant is of course dominated by the PCIe and M.2 slots, as it should be. But before I get to them let's finish up the connections on the bottom edge. There is a serial COM header then three more 4-pin PWM fan headers. That totals up to 7 on the entire board which is more than average. Last up on the end is the front panel audio header. That sits in the isolated section on the end there along with the rest of the onboard audio. The TUF Gaming X870-Plus Wifi runs the Realtek ALC1220P 7.1 Surround Sound High Definition Audio CODEC. It has impedance sense for front and rear headphone outputs and an internal amplifier and they do have the audio chipset covered with a metal shield to help isolate it more alongside of the isolated PCB. For the PCIe connections, you get two in total and both are the full x16 length but only the top one supports x16. That slot is PCIe 5.0 on the CPUs that support it and supports bifurcation as well. The bottom slot runs only at x4 and is PCIe 4.0. Both slots do share lanes with M.2 slots, the main PCIe slot will drop down to x8 if you also use the M.2_2 slot and the bottom PCIe x4 slot will turn off when you run something in M.2_4 so keep that in mind. X870 has fewer lanes available than X870E and it shows here. For M.2 slots you have four in total with the top two being PCIe 5.0 x4 and running directly off of the CPU lanes whereas the bottom two are PCie 4.0 and run through the chipset. Three of those M.2 locations have cooling and the bottom one doesn’t.

The lower number of USB ports available on the X870 chipset in comparison to X870E is more noticeable here on the rear I/O of the TUF Gaming X870-Plus Wifi but that isn’t to say you won't have enough. You get 10 USB ports in total. Five of those are USB 3.2 Gen 1 and they are on the right side with the darker blue, Asus has those labeled as 5G USB which could get a little confusing for some (not that all USB naming isn’t confusing at this point). There are three Type-A USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports, which have a lighter blue color. There is one USB 2.0 plug which is also the BIOS update port. Then two Type-C connections are USB 4 or 40G ports. They almost touched on every available USB speed but missed out on USB 3.2 Gen 2x2, but the USB 4 will cover that. I wouldn’t mind seeing a few more USB 2.0 plugs however, those can be nice for simple devices. You have one HDMI plug and on the left at the top a 2.5GbE ethernet plug. That runs on the Realtek 2.5G NIC. There are also two jacks for the included wireless antenna. They don’t list what wireless chipset this is on the specification, but it is MediaTek Wifi 7. Last up, on the right are the audio connections and the TUF Gaming X870-Plus Wifi has more connections than the Aorus X870 board that I already took a look at today. You get the full array of jacks and they are color-coded but optical is missing. In place of optical, you have the BIOS flashback button that combined with the USB 2.0 port you can update the BIOS on the TUF Gaming X870-Plus Wifi without having the RAM or CPU installed which is helpful later in life if the board doesn’t have a BIOS that supports a new CPU and you don’t have a newer CPU to do the update.

The back of the TUF Gaming X870-Plus Wifi shows off the black PCB but there isn’t too much going on back here. The only thing is the TUF Gaming branding printed across a majority of the back and this is also where they have hidden all of the required certification logos as well.

BIOS

   Rather than have stacks of pictures I put together a basic video that just goes through and clicks on each menu option in the BIOS so if there is anything you want to check out you can see it and pause when needed. The BIOS for the TUF Gaming X870-Plus Wifi opened up on the EZ-Mode page which is good to see. Often this is the only page a user will need to visit and that is because you can check to make sure your memory is picked up, check the status of fans, turn on XMP or Expo for your memory, and change the boot priority. Asus even makes that last one easy to do with drag and drop. You can also use a simple EZ system tuning option here for a basic overclock as well and get into QFan to tune your fan profiles. Even as a power user, this is all I will dive into on a lot of builds.

You can then go to the advanced mode down on the bottom to get to other BIOS features. This is what you would expect from a traditional BIOS, only you can still use a mouse and navigate things. I do have to say that both in the EZ Mode and Advanced mode, they are looking better. Asus has upgraded to HD resolutions and it shows!The landing page here is the Main tab and this shows your BIOS version and CPU and you can change the language and time. Next up however is the Ai Tweaker which these days might make you think it is AI related, but this is Asus’s normal name for their overclocking settings. Here you can set the main overclocking settings all right up at the top. Then as you scroll down you start to get into the more detailed options. The only thing missing really, and this is something I have said for a while now. But I feel like the AMD CPU-specific pages like the AMD CBS menu should also be in the Ai Tweaker section but you will find all of those under the advanced tab. Speaking of that tab this is where you will get into setting pages for all of the features on the TUF Gaming X870-Plus Wifi. You have PCI subsystem pages, USB, networking, NVMe, SATA, Hard drive, and more all gathered up in this section.

From there the next tab is the Monitor section. This has pages for temperature monitoring, fan speed monitoring, voltage monitoring, and also the Q-Fan tool’s options which is always a little weird that those aren’t just on the Q-Fan page. The Boot tab is exactly what you would expect, all of the startup options including changing your boot order, fast bootup, and similar options. Last up is the Tool page. This is where useful tools like Asus Secure Erase for wiping hard drives are hidden away. You also have the EZ Flash 3 utility for BIOS flashing and a few other cool tools like Q-Dashboard that lets you see a picture of the TUF Gaming X870-Plus Wifi and mouse over things to see what it is and its status. On the far right side on all of the advanced mode pages you have CPU details like frequency, temperature, BCLK speed, and information on the prediction settings are all shown. Then up top, there are a few options always available like the Aura lighting options to turn all lighting off, ReSize BAR setting, and QFan which opens up and lets you tune your fan profiles. Then at the end, when you save any changes you have made are all listed. This is big if you are just exploring and changing something without noticing that you did it.

Test Rig and Procedures

Test System

CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D – Live Pricing

Cooling: Corsair H100i RGB Platinum - Live Pricing

Noctua NT-H1 Thermal Paste - Live Pricing

   Memory:    G.Skill Trident Z5 Neo DDR5 16GBx2 6000MHz - Live Pricing

Storage:    Kingston FURY Renegade 2TB PCIe 4.0 SSD- Live Pricing

Video Card: Nvidia RTX 4090 FE - Live Pricing

Power Supply: Corsair AX1200 - Live Pricing

Case: Primochill Wetbench - Live Pricing

OS: Windows 11 Pro 64-bit - Live Pricing

Performance

   When it comes to performance testing, typically motherboard to motherboard we aren’t going to see any big performance difference when running the same components and clock speeds. The exception to that is when boards are auto overclocking of course and there are a few areas where components can make a difference like with ethernet and USB controllers. For testing the TUF Gaming X870-Plus Wifi I have compared it against the Gigabyte X870 Aorus Elite Wifi7 that I previously tested. This just gives us a comparison point to make sure things are still in line and the TUF Gaming X870-Plus Wifi did come in just slightly behind in most of those tests but still in line with what you would expect.

The one area where motherboard testing does sometimes vary would be in the network testing and for that, I checked out both wired and wireless performance on the TUF Gaming X870-Plus Wifi and once again both of these were right with the Aorus board as well, running a little faster on the wireless but otherwise on par.

In my testing, I did run into one small note that came up when setting things up. I’ve been a huge fan of the twist latches for M.2 drives that Asus has used. They stepped things up even more with a new snap-in clip design here. The only downside was that it was behind the heatsink that screwed down which some of their higher-end boards have creative ways to get around that.

I also took a look at the RGB lighting on the TUF Gaming X870-Plus Wifi and this isn’t a board with a lot of lighting. But Asus did use more than I saw on the Aorus board. Even still, all of the RGB lighting was still focused on one area with underglow lighting up under the right side of the board and only on the bottom half. I am fine with lots of RGB or none at all, but if you are going to have it I would like to see a little more around the board. The only other LEDs were the status LEDs in the top right corner, but those played a different role.

Last up, I ran AIDA64’s CPU stress test on the FPU setting for over a half hour to heat things up so we could see what happens with the VRMs over time. I was initially concerned that the two different heatsinks not being tied together would have them at different temperatures but that didn’t happen too much. The PCB did soak up more heat than we saw with the Aorus board, that board had larger heatsinks than the TUF Gaming X870-Plus Wifi. Overall though nothing was too hot or concerning.

Overall and Final Verdict

I have a feeling that the styling on the TUF Gaming X870-Plus Wifi is going to be a little divisive and honestly, it isn’t the styling that I would want. But I think overall the large truck-like styling not only fits the TUF brand perfectly, but it also seems to target a market that no one else has in the past and I like seeing that. It’s easy for a lot of PC styling to echo chamber a lot and just boil back down to one look that is trending at the time and Asus is doing a good job of avoiding that with this along with their other lines like the Pro-Art that go in completely different directions. The TUF Gaming X870-Plus Wifi as a board had a good variety of connection options including a little of everything for USB connectivity. You also get three aRGB headers which is nice to see, it wasn’t long ago when one of those was all you get. There were a few tradeoffs though, for example on the RGB header front you don’t get any of the older 4-pin RGB headers. One of those might be nice, especially with some AIO and other devices that can use those to tie in with your motherboard lighting. You get a lot of M.2 expandability, but again you trade off with limited lanes meaning when you use all four of those you lose your second PCIe slot and the main one drops down to x8.

Because we now have one other X870 board to compare the TUF Gaming X870-Plus Wifi too already tested. The TUF Gaming X870-Plus Wifi did have smaller VRM heatsinks compared to the Aorus board and a little more heat soaked into the PCB when testing. More importantly, that comparison also hurts the TUF Gaming X870-Plus Wifi when it comes to pricing as well with its 309.99 MSRP. That puts it $20 higher and other than more fan headers and 30-watt charging on the front panel USB it feels like the two boards should have price parity not have one priced higher. Overall though, I like what Asus has done with the TUF Gaming X870-Plus Wifi. But do keep an eye on pricing to help with your purchase because that does change as time goes on.

Live Pricing: HERE

Author Bio

Author: garfi3ldWebsite: http://lanoc.org

Editor-in-chief

You might call him obsessed or just a hardcore geek. Wes's obsession with gaming hardware and gadgets isn't anything new, he could be found taking things apart even as a child. When not poking around in PC's he can be found playing League of Legends, Awesomenauts, or Civilization 5 or watching a wide variety of TV shows and Movies. A car guy at heart, the same things that draw him into tweaking cars apply when building good looking fast computers. If you are interested in writing for Wes here at LanOC you can reach out to him directly using our contact form.